Month: Oct 2016

This review has been published days after the first episode of Series 7 has been broadcast, so yes, it is totally filled with spoilers. Consider yourself warned!

Well, shit!

After a remarkably pathetic end to Series 6 I must admit it was hard to care about The Walking Dead in the off-season. The reveal of the new big bad guy was much delayed so that Negan was only on-screen for a few minutes and he seemed decidedly one-note. This was the guy whose name had been a whispered threat running through the last series?! And his weapon of choice is a baseball bat?! Humph!

And then we knew who dunnit, but didn’t know who he’d dunnit to, thanks to the totally shitty ‘blood on the lens’ effect. Such an obvious manipulative tactic to keep the audience interested. I’d have been really angry if I could have mustered the effort. Newsflash! This is series 6 into 7. If by now the writers and production team haven’t realised by now the audience is interested and loyal, and there’s zero chance of getting canned by Fox, then they’re far thicker than we ever imagined.

Another tv treat from the Birmingham Literature Festival this year was Hans Rosenfeldt and Ed Thomas in conversation. The men may not have household names, but you’ll certainly know their work. Hans is the leader writer and creator of international mega-hit The Bridge and Ed writes the sparse and beautiful Hinterland set in Wales. Both shows are available for a cosy night in on Netflix. The guys were on the programme as a duo because they both write about murders and cops in a distinctly unusual bilingual fashion. The interviewer from the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain skillfully weaved their experiences together, but for ease of reading I’ve pulled them apart again, with a bit of chat about similarities and differences to act as *ahem* a bridge between the two…

The Bridge – Hans Rosenfeldt

Hans is a big lumberjack type who looks super comfortable in front of the audience. I’m sure he’s well versed in talking about Saga, Martin and The Bridge. He starts by telling us a little about the writing process – 70% of the episodes he writes alone in Swedish. The scripts are translated after the third draft by a ‘proper’ translator and then one writer makes it sound “less translated” and turns it into ‘improper’ spoken Danish. He says despite Swedish and Danish sounding pretty close to our English ears “we made up the fact that we understand each other”. He says not understanding would have given them big problems with tense scenes like interrogations. So, despite appearances, it’s all false and Swedes especially have trouble with Danish. He says he’s not massively happy with the subtitles on Netflix as they are not always correct and English-speaking audiences are losing a little in translation.

Robot Wars number one fan The Mighty Jontosaurus relives the highlights of the epic new series…

It came, it saw, it conquered, and it smashed absolutely everything into a thousand tiny pieces. The new series of Robot Wars was as destructive as I thought it would be, and in the end, history repeated itself when a mighty spinner and a powerful flipper met in the grand final. Reminiscent of the series 3 grand final where Hynodisc and Chaos 2- two of the most iconic machines in Robot Wars in history battled it out, with the latter triumphing, this year’s final saw the fantastic Carbide meet the entertaining Apollo in the final.

Dah dah dah daaaah, dada! Dah dah dah daaaah dah dah dah dah daaaaah! Name that tune! Even written in that shoddy fashion I bet you can guess. Has there ever been a more exciting quiz show theme? I don’t think so.

It’s a welcome return to The Crystal Maze last seen in 1995. This was one-off celebrity special of the much-loved 1990s game show with the aim of getting you to part with your cash for the Stand Up to Cancer charity. Special programmes are on Channel 4 all week, which culminates in a Comic Relief-style live show on Friday night.

David Tennant was mentioned in contention for the host duties, but quickly after that story leaked Stephen Merchant was confirmed. He looked fabulous in his Richard O’Brien outfit, holding hands and running around with the contestants, but just looked plain silly with a shaved head. (However, if he raised extra dosh for SU2C with a sponsored head shave then good on him.) Happily the orignal (and best) host Richard O’Brien popped up on screen at the start to give them a riddle to unlock the maze.

I was excited to see that the purity of the Birmingham Literary Festival has been infiltrated this year by the lowly gogglebox. In amongst the bearded academics and the beat-boxing poets we find Walter Iuzzolino, the driving force behind the staggeringly successful world drama mission on Channel 4 and their streaming service All4. In just 9 months they’ve taken a chance on 24 series from around the globe and been rewarded with 15 million streams. That’s a lot of viewers.

Big things were expected for Westworld, the telly reboot of the 1973 sci-fi film, and big things were achieved. It was HBO’s biggest series debut in three years. And it looks magnificent!

Westworld is a theme park – the newcomers are the players, the high-paying guests who get to live out their cowboy frontier town fantasy. Sex and violence is the top two reasons people seem to play, and sexy violence is probably competing for third place. The innocent townspeople who populate the game are extremely advanced androids (incredibly beautiful and faces full of character), who live in a Groundhog day-dream state, to please the guests and keep them entertained.

Through wholesome Delores (Evan Rachel Wood) and her cowboy lover Teddy (James Marsden) we briefly glimpse a clichéd romance fantasy before life quickly turns sour. It’s horrific to watch, and worse still she wakes in blissful ignorance the next day to be preyed upon all over again. Despite how real these androids seem these are just toys programmed for paying customers pleasure. We know this and yet our sympathies lie squarely with the machines from the opening moments.